Corporate Social Responsibility: Our Communities

We use our time, talent and treasure to support our communities.

Iron Mountain’s robust network and infrastructure of 18,000 employees and 1,000 facilities are actively engaged with our global community. We offer volunteerism, financial grant awards and in-kind service to non-profits and non-government organizations to help make our neighborhoods a better place to work and live. Through our strategic charitable investment program, the Living Legacy Initiative, we help museums and other nonprofit institutions protect and provide access to cultural and heritage information. The majority of our grant funding, time and resources are committed to partnership development within our Living Legacy Initiative focus. Beyond our core focus, we occasionally offer grants that serve global partners; build brand awareness; assist with disaster relief; or aid in advancing a specific company objective. These categories represent a minority of our financial investments but are expected to deliver measurable results. In addition, we also support our communities through our Moving Mountains volunteer program which encourages employees to volunteer by offering paid time off and awards for their activism.

Key Highlights

Financial Support:In 2015, we distributed $900,000 to 45 organizations across North America.

Our Initiatives

Our employees are actively engaged in their individual communities through our Moving Mountains volunteer program. This program encourages them to make an impact, support their personal causes and report their results. Iron Mountain, moreover, offers all full-time employees in the U.S. and Canada 16 hours of paid time off to volunteer annually and gives the top volunteers’ chosen charities a cash grant in honor of the employee’s time.

Since the program launched in May 2012, employees have logged over 216,853 volunteer hours with thousands of non-profits and community organizations across North America. May is designated as “May is Moving Mountains Month” in which employees are urged to volunteer for their favorite causes and win awards for their organizations. Iron Mountain also shares an employee’s volunteer story each week on its internal website to inspire others’ call to action.

The Living Legacy Initiative

Iron Mountain believes that it has an important role to play in creating social value in the communities in which we operate. We are committed to pursuing that responsibly and being a helpful member of our communities worldwide. Every day we protect our customer’s most vital assets and information and we extend that same expertise to our non-profit and non-governmental organizations partners through our Living Legacy Initiative.

The Living Legacy Initiative is our company’s commitment to preserve and make accessible our cultural and historical information, world artifacts and treasures. It is our belief that everyone deserves equal access to the ideas and artifacts that compose our human experience, regardless of economic or geographic barriers.

How the Living Legacy Initiative works

Iron Mountain identifies potential partners through an interview and rolling RFP process and then chooses organizations based on a combination of need, impact of the proposed project, and Iron Mountain’s ability to make meaningful contributions to the project’s success. We look at factors including the organizations’: mission, preservation work, geography, historical time period, ability to affect customer or employee engagement and public awareness. Living Legacy helps museums and other nonprofit institutions protect and provide access to myriad of cultural and heritage data resources by offering a combination of financial grants, in-kind services and customized management expertise. Examples of in-kind services include digitizing documents and analog media; restoring deteriorated film and audio reels; storing hardcopy items for archival or disaster recovery purposes; and archiving documentation online.

Why this work is so important

To lose a piece of our culture or heritage is to lose a piece of ourselves. We must preserve it and make sure it’s accessible so that we may better understand ourselves and each other. Most of us tend to take for granted our ability to access elements of our culture and heritage like famous landmarks or historical documents. But these original sites and records won’t last forever. Eventually we’ll lose them to age, weather, disaster, war or other threats.

While technology allows us to create digital copies of physical items and to share them via the Internet, many museums and cultural institutions lack the financial resources and know-how to properly preserve cultural material and make it digitally available. Through the Living Legacy Initiative, Iron Mountain can help its partners with requisite resources and expertise. This advances the organization’s mission of preservation and education and gives Iron Mountain the opportunity to do something it loves and finds critically important.

Why Iron Mountain believes it can make a difference

At our core, we protect information and create access to it. That’s what we do today for 94 percent of the Fortune 1000, and that’s what we did 60 years ago when we opened as an underground storage facility for protecting records from the possibility of nuclear war. Over this time, we have grown to become the world’s largest information storage and management company, with a broad portfolio of solutions for storing, accessing and using information; an expansive service network across 36 countries, and decades of experience and knowledge on how to protect and manage information.